In other words, I had a slight winter cold but, just in
order to defy the common fallacious beliefs about gender stereotyping, I
battled on right through it with the minimum of fuss, and only had the odd
early night to let anyone in the world know that I was slightly “under the
weather…”
You see how thoughtful I can be. I might have gone on and on
and on about it right here, in that way we’re supposed to do as “modern men”
but I refuse point blank to accept that such sexist beliefs ought to be
tolerated in either direction, even if it is merely to redress the balance
after centuries of injustice in the other direction.
Now that it is “unacceptable” for workplaces to hang
calendars portraying naked women in an exploitative way, why should we find a
profusion of men’s bottoms in our advertisements any more acceptable? Equally,
why is it acceptable for mainstream supermarkets to imply that men have little
input into the average family Christmas in a campaign that seems to have upset
the feminists almost as much as the men who find themselves run ragged over the
festive season…? The word is
Thankfully, to keep me from brooding upon such dark thoughts
and my own sense of feeling pretty woeful, there was cricket on the radio to
keep me amused and away from the distractions of composing witty TwitterBanter
instead, because inspiration was otherwise failing to strike me as I sat at the
keyboard in the small hours trying to come up with things to write about, and
it was nice to have something to listen to in order to commit the one thing we
ought not to attempt: killing time.
After all, we get little enough of it, and so deliberately
squandering it seems like such a waste…
Then, rather ironically in this context, I had an evening to
myself, which is never a good thing despite the fact that it ought to be. These
days I’m just not all that good at spending time in my own company. I get
twitchy. I get distracted. There’s so much that I could do that I find it hard
to decide quite what to do, and so I end up doing very little.
I thought that I’d perhaps spend the evening writing, but
then I found that I couldn’t seem to find any desire to write and, not only
that, I really didn’t want to spend the time writing. It’s all very disturbing
but does at least convince me that I really do need to take some time away from
the keyboard, and fairly soon, too…
And it was cold.
Work is becoming busier as we approach the most frantic
period of our production year which is traditionally (and rather wickedly) pitched exactly three weeks beyond Christmas in
order to ruin it for everyone in the industry. It’s also far less easy to
concentrate upon such things as it is the season for those slight winter colds,
and for everyone involved, that nagging sense of feeling slightly ill descends
properly alongside the niggling sense of guilt that you really need to keep
calm and carry on…
I also forgot how utterly draining and exhausting writing a
long project can be. Since it has finished, I’ve been scrabbling around and
utterly failing to string anything like an ordinary blog posting together, and
still am, if I’m being completely honest.
It’s tricky. Nothing seems “significant” enough after
churning out a twenty-five part posting. Picking and choosing the “next” thing
to put on the shelf next to it seems very difficult to compose, and yet I’m
still here, trying and struggling to fill a page with coherent thoughts about
anything very much at all, and still pondering upon the shortcomings of my own
daily efforts at word-wrangling and wondering again about the point of it all.
Not only that, but as that particular story continued to
unfold over in the heady, giddy world of “page-a-day” publishing, the numbers (because
with me it’s always about the numbers),
whilst they started off healthily enough, seemed to crash into a metaphorical
brick wall and, if I had bothered to save the graph, looked as if they had
plunged off a cliff.
Do I know how to drive people away by attempting to
entertain them or what…?
A gift freely given does not, after all, have to be
gratefully received if it’s something that you really, really do not want, and
if it’s a cheap and nasty gift, a pale parody of a thing of the sort you might
find on the market or in the petrol station, then it’s just as likely to end up
in the bin just as soon as you think nobody’s looking.
In other words, what kind of an idiot writes a long story
quite badly that no-one wants to read and stick with it regardless and over
such a protracted period off time…?
What was I thinking…?
But it was intended as a “gift” to anyone who was
interested. The problem is that the people at whom it was aimed chose not to
read it, and very, very few people actually did… Either that or perhaps I’m
just not the sort of person who people consider “like”-able... (and there I was, saying only a couple of days ago that I would not mention it again... Obsessive...? Moi...?)
It’s cold out there…
And the rains have returned, too…
I must still be “quite” likeable, though. I recently got a
party invite and, for once, I was even considering (for the time being
anyway) that I might quite like to go. It
would, after all, at least be another opportunity to dig out the suit to wear.
Unfortunately, this time the wiser head of the household is rather less keen to
go, so I suppose we won’t end up going.
But it’s nice to be asked…
If nothing else it proves that I’m not quite the social
outcast that I sometimes believe that I’ve become.
Yet…
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